Home > WHAT'S YOUR FAVORITE SCIENCE THEORY?Bangalore: John Brockman, the literary agent who presides over the online salon Edge.org every January puts forward a question and asks his circle of scientists and scholars to tackle the question.

WHAT'S YOUR FAVORITE SCIENCE THEORY?Bangalore: John Brockman, the literary agent who presides over the online salon Edge.org every January puts forward a question and asks his circle of scientists and scholars to tackle the question.

[1.16.12]

... many nominated ideas were not from those found in science courses taught in school or college. Neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky of Stanford University thinks the most beautiful idea to him would be emergence, in which complex phenomena almost magically comes into being from extremely simple components. For example, a human being arises from a few thousand genes. The intelligence of an ant colony - labor specialization, intricate underground nests comes from the seemingly senseless behavior of thousands of individual ants. He says that "Critically, there's no blueprint or central source of command and out of this emerges a highly efficient colony."

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... many nominated ideas were not from those found in science courses taught in school or college. Neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky of Stanford University thinks the most beautiful idea to him would be emergence, in which complex phenomena almost magically comes into being from extremely simple components. For example, a human being arises from a few thousand genes. The intelligence of an ant colony - labor specialization, intricate underground nests comes from the seemingly senseless behavior of thousands of individual ants. He says that "Critically, there's no blueprint or central source of command and out of this emerges a highly efficient colony."